Monday, March 03, 2008

Whither Twitter?

We've written about Twitter and possible news implications here before. Some of our newsrooms are using Twitter streams to spread news, and many of us as individuals are trying it out. (Follow me as howardweaver, for instance).

It is like a microblog, a place to say your piece, or Tweet, in 140 characters or less.

And it is a place to listen.

Unlike my soapbox of a blog, my Twitter home page is actually a waterfall of other people’s words, blended in a real time river from streams around the world. They are people I have stumbled upon and collected simply by clicking on the button to “follow” them.

2 comments:

With twitter we experience the transience of the web within a human timeframe. Twitter simultaneously deconstructs and constructs new communication. Interested in your thoughts on the news implications, which seem tremendous to me. Audiences are splintered, attention is fractured, info consuming patterns are rapidly changing.

And limited to what you call your "followers". I noted in a Twitter demo just recently that I personally have more followers than most newspaper Twitter accounts even though newspapers are far more able to produce useful and interesting "tweets" than I am.

I twitter about what's going on in MY world... MY interests and MY thoughts. Media outlets could twitter on a community's interests and thoughts.

About Howard

This site is being retired.
Much of my work will continue to be collected here, but you can find my commentary more reliably at edge & flow or my Sacramento Bee SacConnect site, Quantum Dice. Most of my digital datastream is linked from here. You should also follow me on Twitter here.